Tag Archives: Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Crooked Billary Clinton and Bernie Sanders appear together at a bullshit “unity” event on November 3, 2016, days before Billary spectacularly blew the presidential election. Former Democratic National Committee head Donna Brazile has confirmed for us further how much the DNC was in the bag for Billary all along.

Former interim Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile’s new book, excerpted by Politico, only confirms what we already knew, only it’s even worse than we already knew: Billary Clinton’s presidential campaign was so thoroughly enmeshed with the financially struggling DNC — which relied upon mountains of cash from the Billary camp to keep going — that of course actual Democrat Bernie Sanders never had a fucking chance.

The committee’s slow fundraising has been a serious problem for the party since the 2016 election. Skeptical donors have stayed away from the DNC, while giving more to individual candidates and other committees. The party had just $7 million on hand heading into October, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

The DNC raised $51 million from January through September as it rebuilds under new chairman Tom Perez, who took over in March. But the Republican National Committee brought in $104 million over the same time period.

Who wants to give money to a corrupt party organization? I sure the fuck don’t. I don’t trust the DNC with a fucking penny.

Because of the corrupt Democratic Party establishment, which has yet to be taken over by us progressives, us actual Democrats, I changed my voter registration to no party and I won’t register as a Democrat again until and unless the party deserves my return.

For years the Democratic Party has acted as though we, the people, owe it, and that it owes us absofuckinglutely nothing.

I still give money to individual candidates, and yes, the vast majority of them are progressive Democrats* — I’d rather castrate myself with a toothpick than cast a vote for any Repugnican — but they’re the candidates of my choosing, not the DNC’s. (On that note, I gave Bernie more than $1,000 in campaign contributions over time. That’s more money than I’ve ever given any other political candidate by far.)

The answer to the DNC’s money woes is pretty clear: People won’t give you money unless they’re minimally excited about you and what you’re doing and they trust you. You have to earn their money. (Who knew?)

On that note, per Wikipedia, through April 30, 2016, Billary raised about $204 million to Bernie’s roughly $228 million. She’d run for president before and he entered the race largely unknown, but Bernie still out-raised her, and most of his donations (as he told us tirelessly) were small ones.

Excite the people and earn and thus gain their trust, as Bernie did, and the money will follow.

But as long as the ghosts of Billary and the other Democrats in name only still haunt the DNC and as long as the establishmentarian DINOs only continue to shit and piss on us progressives — us real Democrats — the DNC can keep on digging its own grave.

We progressives are fine just sitting back and watching that happen. The DNC as it exists today doesn’t deserve our support. Indeed, if it continues to resist returning the party to us progressives, it deserves to die, as it will without us, and we progressives will continue to build for ourselves the party that we deserve.

Among other things, Warren said that current DNC Chair Tom Perez “is being tested now” and that he “is going to succeed by bringing Bernie Sanders and Bernie Sanders’ representatives into this process … or he’s going to fail, and I very much hope he succeeds.”

It is good to hear her say all of this now, but, to be fair and balanced, Warren pretty much sat back and stayed silent while Team Billary’s theft of the presidential nomination via its collusion with the DNC was happening, and only Bernie Sanders had had the courage to oppose the coronation of Billary by daring to run in the primary against her. Warren didn’t dare to step on Queen Billary’s cape.

If Bernie runs again in 2020, he has my full support. He has earned it. He was there and he led.

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*When I give money to a candidate, it’s usually a candidate who actually has a chance of winning, and so yes, I vote mostly for Democrats. Usually my aim is to support the candidate who is the most progressive yet still viable.

That said, the United States sorely needs to adopt a multi-party, parliamentarian system. To collapse the entire American political spectrum into only two main parties, the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party, is an anti-democratic joke. The corporations and our plutocratic overlords love it, but the duopolistic partisan system stopped serving us, the people, many, many years ago.

Despite the huge crowds that true populist Bernie Sanders garnered in his campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination (the photo above is from Bernie’s rally in Portland, Oregon, in August 2015) — and despite the fact that Bernie remains the most popular politician on the U.S. national stage today — the Billarybots and the limousine liberals just can’t think of who could or should take on “President” Pussygrabber (or “President” Pence…) in 2020. No fucking wonder the Billarybots and limo libbies, with theirpolitical acumen, cost us the election in November.

“If you look at the numbers, Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in America – and it’s not even close,” writes The Guardian’s Trevor Timm. “Yet bizarrely, the Democratic party — out of power across the country and increasingly irrelevant — still refuses to embrace him and his message. It’s increasingly clear they do so at their own peril.”

This poll is not just an aberration. Look at this Huffington Post chart that has tracked Sanders’ favorability rating over time, ever since he gained national prominence in 2015 when he started running for the Democratic nomination. The more people got to know him, they more they liked him – the exact opposite of what his critics said would happen when he was running against Clinton.

One would think with numbers like that, Democratic politicians would be falling all over themselves to be associated with Sanders, especially considering the party as a whole is more unpopular than the Republicans and even Donald Trump right now. [Emphasis mine.]

Yet instead of embracing his message, the establishment wing of the party continues to resist him at almost every turn, and they seem insistent that they don’t have to change their ways to gain back the support of huge swaths of the country. …

Well, indeed, for most members of the Democratic Party establishment, they’ve been using the party not to benefit the highest number of other human beings that’s possible (which is the credo and the modus operandi of true progressivism), but to benefit themselves. They’re addicted to that self-serving power, and they’re not going to give it up any year soon.

The solution?

In a recent column, leftist Ted Rall posits that the Democratic Party could split into two parties — into actual Democrats, that is, those of us who actually are progressive, and the remnants of the center-right, sellout, corporate-ass-licking, Repugnican-Lite, Clinton-Obama Democratic Party.

Rall even suggests a name for us actual Democrats who split off from the current Democratic/Repugnican Lite establishment: the Progressive Party or the New Progressive Party.

Rall notes that of course in the short term, the split of the Democratic Party into two different parties probably would benefit the Repugnican Tea Party. But of course over time the (New) Progressive Party, actually representing the best interests of the majority of the American people for fucking once, probably would siphon off enough support from the Old Democratic Party that the Old Democratic Party over time would wither, dry up and blow away, as things that are irrelevant and obsolete tend to do.

Indeed, my response to the current Democratic/Repugican Lite establishment that tells us actual progressives that we have nowhere else to go is something like this: Fuuuuuck you! We can leave you and form our own party, and then if you want to win any elections, you’ll have to join us, bitches! You’ll have nowhere else to go!

Abject, intractable Democratic establishment stupidity and stubbornness were at least as much a factor in Pussygrabber’s “win” as were white racism or Russia’s interference, I am confident.

But of course I don’t expect the prideful Billarybots ever to admit that they, with their stubborn, mind-blowingstupidity in making an individual whose favorability ratings all along were in the negative* their presidential candidate, were instrumental in bringing us “President” Pussygrabber.

That’s why I’m fully on board with Ted Rall’s idea of the Democratic Party splitting into two and letting survival of the political fittest take its course.

At this point I’m thinking that that’s probably the only way to drive a stake through the cold hearts of the DINOs for once and for all.

Not that it would be easy.

To give just one example, limousine liberal Bill Maher and his limousine liberal guests on his show this past Friday night (Andrew Sullivan and the even worse Barney Frank, who is a huge DINO sellout) all claimed that they just couldn’t think of someone who could take on “President” Pussygrabber in 2020 (assuming that he’s still there, of course).

All signs point to the probability that the limo libbies and the Billarybots don’t want actual progressivism in the United States of America, because it would threaten their privileged status, their status in which they pay lip service to progressivism but actually live their over-privileged lives in an entirely other way.

We true progressives face a war on two fronts: against the Repugnican Tea Party traitors and the DINO traitors who want to continue their center-right, self-serving, sellout bullshit — which no longer wins elections because we commoners are on to them — in perpetuity.

If we progressives want to win the war, me must dissociate ourselves from the DINOs, who only want to take us down with them.

In the Suffolk University poll, Pussygrabber, Mike Pence and the Repugnican Tea Party as a whole all fare better than both Billary and the Democratic Party as a whole. (Bernie Sanders was not in the poll.)

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*Billary Clinton’s net unfavorable/negative ratings began in April 2015 and persisted all the way through the November 2016 presidential election. See her favorability timeline here.

As Trevor Timm eluded to, it was very different for Bernie Sanders; the more people got to know him, the more they liked him. Bernie Sanders saw nothing but growing net favorable/positive ratings from July 2015, when people were starting to get to know him, all the way through the November 2016 presidential election. See his favorability timeline here.

While I’d thought that Bernie Sanders would be blamed for Billary Clinton’s loss to Der Fuhrer Donald Trump for having had the audacity to challenge her for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, instead Bernie apparently is indeed the face of the Democratic Party that is emerging from the still-smoldering ashes. His new book, Our Revolution, comes out next week and already is on amazon.com’s list of top-100 best-selling titles as I type this sentence.

If I were to make a bumper sticker, that’s what it would say: Don’t blame me — I voted for Bernie!*

No, I’m not retroactively changing my stance in the wake of Billary Clinton’s stunning loss to a fascist demagogue who, for the first time in my lifetime, became U.S. president without previously having held some other elected office to help prepare him for the job.

… But if we just don’t mention how weak Billary is, then everything will be OK! Magically, her weakness only exists if someone who is left of center dares to utter something about it! Loose lips sink ships!

And when Billary loses to Donald Trump in November, we won’t blame her, but we’ll blame Bernie Sanders.That’s The Way of the Democratic Party Hack/Billarybot. …

and:

… If we progressives don’t take the Democratic Party back with Bernie Sanders, we’ll take it back with someone else — with Elizabeth Warren and/or with whomever else emerges in a leadership position or positions.

We are patient. …

and:

… Finally, it strikes me that we — all of us, Democrat and Repugnican (and everything else) — don’t deserve a President Sanders but fully deserve a President Trump. …

I still believe that, by the way: That Bernie Sanders is too good for the United States of America. He’s too smart, too honest, too moral. And Americans amply have demonstrated their depravity by allowing Repugnican Lite Billary Clinton and her “Democratic” henchweasels to steal the Democratic Party presidential nomination and by allowing President Pussygrabber to sit in the Oval Office come January.

That said, I did follow the presidential-election polling closely — I especially followed fivethirtyeight.com, which for weeks and weeks had put Der Fuhrer Trump’s White House win at a significant improbability — and so yes, I had come to expect Billary most likely to win, and so for a little while I was in a bit of a state of shock and awe (awe of the bad kind).

But it didn’t last long. Life goes on, shit must still get done, and the political pendulum always swings back your way, in time.

In retrospect Billary’s loss was quite foreseeable — I wrote about it here months ago — and it’s good that the Democratic Party establishment has been smashed to pieces. Because from those pieces, those ashes, needs to rise a new, actually progressive party.

Happily, I apparently was wrong about my prediction that Bernie Sanders would be blamed for Billary’s loss by the Billarybots. Tellingly, it’s been largely radio silence from Billary and the Billarybots, and the early signs are that third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein might be blamed by the Democratic Party hacks for Billary’s loss, much how Ralph Nader was blamed by the Dem Party hacks for Al Gore’s lackluster presidential campaign in 2000.

I’d thought that Bernie would be blamed for Billary’s loss, but the No. 1 thing that thus far I’ve seen blamed, way too conveniently, for Billary’s loss is white racism/white supremacism.

While that was a significant factor in Billary’s loss, no doubt, that wasn’t at all all that there was to it, and the Democratic Party never will recover if its adherents refuse to look beyond that.

Billary was an incredibly weak candidate. Fuck, Bernie Sanders, a relative unknown and not even a Democrat (that’s a good thing!) but an independent, a democratic socialist,won 46 percent of the pledged (democratically earned) delegates in the Democratic Party presidential primary fight — that’s how unpopular Billary has been within her own fucking party.

Billary has a mountain of baggage and no one fucking likes her. The electorate did not want a blast from the past, a return to the Clinton era of the 1990s. The electorate did not want another Clinton or another Bush in the White House (which is why the Billarybots within and without the Democratic National Committee had to do their best to sink Bernie and to boost Billary; the product that they were pushing down our throats is fatally flawed, and so they had to cheat mightily).

And over the past few decades, first under Bill Clinton and then continued under Barack Obama, the Democratic Party stopped being a truly populist party. It stopped caring about the working class and the remnants of the middle class, to whom it only paid lip service at election time. It abandoned labor unions (except for asking labor union members for campaign cash and and to be campaign workers) and it welcomed the limousine liberal — the rich person who wants to avoid angry mobs coming after him or her and his or her money with torches and pitchforks by having gone on record with the right stances on certain sociopolitical issues.

Yes, over the past many years the Democratic Party became much more about identity politics than about socioeconomic politics, and that’s a huge reason why we’re about to have President Pussygrabber in the White House.

Another huge reason for that potentially devastating development is the Democrats’ refusal to face up to the party’s weaknesses. The Democratic lemming-bots have refused to acknowledge not only Billary’s massive shortcomings, but they have refused to acknowledge that President Obama over these past eight years hasn’t delivered his ubiquitously promised “hope” and “change” but for the most part has given us only more of the same, that he hasn’t been anything remotely resembling a strong, progressive leader, but has been only a caretaker in chief (at best).

That’s another huge reason that Billary lost: Americans looked at the past eight years and recognized, correctly, that another four (or eight) years under Billary Clinton would be just like a third (or third and fourth) Obama term: a continuation of the anesthetizing, centrist slog that the past eight years have been.

Obama in 2008 didn’t campaign on just trying to keep one’s head above water — because that’s not exactly inspirational — but that’s exactly what it has been like for most Americans under his presidency.

Yes, racism, misogyny, patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, jingoism, etc. — the entire Big Basket of Deplorableness — must continue to be addressed and must be continued to be opposed by the Democratic Party and those of us who are left of center, but that can’t continue to be the party’s whole fucking show, or the show is fucking over.

Indeed, methinks that the toxic identity politics that has gripped the Democratic Party in large part is what helped to sink Bernie, who was widely view by the toxic identity politicians as just another old white man (and thus unacceptable as the party’s presidential candidate), even though he’s infinitely more progressive and much more liked than Billary Clinton ever has been or ever will be — indeed, even though he very probably would have beat Trump on Tuesday.

It was supposed to be enough that Billary is a woman, you see.

Obviously, it wasn’t enough, and if the Democratic Party doesn’t learn its lessons — the central lesson of which is to ease off of the toxic identity politics and get back to the bread-and-butter issues that it has abandoned — it could be a long, long time before it’s back in power again, if it ever comes to power again.

This is important to remember if one thinks that white-bashing and/or man-bashing is going to win one a national election.

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*I am quite proud of the fact that I never have cast a vote for the corrupt, center-right, Democratic-in-name-only/Repugnican-Lite Billary Clinton, not once, and that I never have given her even one fucking penny.

Not only did I vote for Bernie Sanders in the California Democratic Party presidential primary in June, but I gave his campaign more than $1,000 over time. I still consider it to have been a good investment in the future — not just mine, but everyone’s and future generations’.

Fivethirtyeight.com right now puts the chance of the above occurring at only 52 percent and the chance of the below occurring at 48 percent. Prolly too early to celly Billary Clinton’s Democratic presidential nomination, methinks.

I truly wish that I could celebrate that, but I just can’t, and I cannot for three main reasons:

Billary Clinton isn’t a progressive.She herself not even a year ago proudly publicly proclaimed herself to be “moderate and center.” This has morphed into her more recent claim that she’s “a progressive who likes to get things done” (or something very close to that), but no, that bullshit rhetoric was deployed just to secure the nomination. She is center-right, which is why so many millionaire and billionaire Repugnicans, like Michael Bloomberg, support her for president. If it were Bernie Sanders’ convention, the likes of billionaire Bloomberg would not be speaking at the fucking Democratic National Convention.

Billary didn’t become the nominee fairly and squarely, but had the help of the “neutral” Democratic National Committee at the highest levels. We have e-mail evidence of that fact (and DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz would not have resigned if there had been nothing there), and Yahoo! News reports that both Bernie’s campaign manager Jeff Weaver and WikiLeaks have indicated that more DNC e-mails and more details of the DNC’s chicanery meant to help Billary and to harm Bernie are forthcoming. The corrupt DNC’s hope and wish, I’m sure, is now that we actual Democrats have DWS’s slimy head on a silver platter, we’ll stop there, but the DNC still needs to be disinfected and decontaminated from top to bottom. And no, blaming Russia won’t cut it. As Bernie supporter and former NAACP head Ben Jealous has pointed out, the Russians didn’t write those DNC e-mails.

Well, the Billarybots got their wish today; it will be Billary on the ballot in November.

When Billary loses to Donald Trump on November 8, the Billarybots will blame Bernie Sanders for having had the audacity to run for the nomination also; they’ll blame us “Bernie bros,” I’m sure, for not obediently and blindly having handed over our hearts, our brains and our testicles and dutifully supported Billary, the obviously weaker of the two candidates (and she’s not even a fucking Democrat, if you define a Democrat as a progressive); and they’ll even blame Russia.

This is as far as their “vision” will allow them to see.

Their blinders will cost them (and those of us who are actual Democrats) the White House. Whether the Democratic Party — and maybe even the entire nation itself — ever will recover from their blindness after Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office remains to be seen.

*But they won’t, so they’re going to lose the November election, and the party as it exists today is doomed.

Associated Press photo

Recently leaked e-mails prove that among other things, the Billarybots within the Democratic National Committee cynically discussed emphasizing Bernie Sanders’ religious beliefs or lack thereof in order to harm his campaign and to help Billary Clinton’s, and “neutral” DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz flat-out wrote about Bernie Sanders in an e-mail, “He isn’t going to be president.” If Democrat in name only Billary Clinton still actually emerges as the party’s presidential nominee this week, know that she did not do so cleanly, fairly and squarely, but that she did it dirtily and corruptly — and that we now have thousands of pages of physical evidence of this fact. (Above, thousands of supporters of Bernie Sanders protest in Philadelphia today, ahead of this week’s coming Democratic National Convention. I fully share their sentiment about the Democratic National Committee.)

The Democratic Party hacks thought that after the train wreck on steroids that was the Repugnican National Convention of last week, their convention this coming week would be, by comparison, flawless.

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sanders said the e-mail leak proved once and for all that Wasserman Schultz was unfit to lead the committee.

“I don’t think she is qualified to be the chair of the DNC,” the Vermont senator said on CNN’s “State of the Union” [today]. “Not only for these awful e-mails — which revealed the prejudice of the DNC — but also because we need a party that reaches out to working people and young people, and I don’t think her leadership style is doing that.”

“I think she should resign, period,” Sanders said on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” [today].

“I think I told you a long time ago that the DNC was not running a fair operation, that they were supporting Secretary Clinton,” he continued. “So what I suggested to be true six months ago turns out, in fact, to be true. I’m not shocked. But I am disappointed. And that is the way it is.” …

But it’s much larger than that one lying, corrupt slimebag. Wasserman Schultz’s slimy head on a silver fucking platter is a great thing, but in and of itself it does nothing to reverse the pervasive corruption within the Billary-controlled Democratic Party, which stopped being a populist, progressive party and instead became a Clintonesque center-right, corporate party decades ago.

If you want to kill the Clinton Beast, you don’t just chop off one of its innumerable slimy tentacles; you have to drive a huge motherfucking stake through its cold, cold, slimy heart.

If the Democratic Party super-delegates were people of integrity instead of worthless party hacks, this coming week at the convention they would throw this thing to Bernie Sanders.

I mean that.

Hell, fuck even integrity; the question becomes whether or not the super-delegates want to nominate the candidate who has the best chance of winning the White House in November, which is supposed to be the No. 1 function of the convention. If the super-delegates have no conscience — and most of them don’t — then the least that they could do is their main job of picking the most likely winner.

… “It might may [sic] no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his [Bernie Sanders’] belief[?] Does he believe in a God[?]” wrote [the apparently fairly illiterate] Brad Marshall, the chief financial officer of the committee. “He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points[‘] difference with my peeps.” [Politico reports that Marshall immediately went on in his e-mail: “My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.” Why The New York Times didn’t report that lovely sentence and sentiment I’m not certain.]

Marshall did not respond on Friday to an e-mail asking for comment. But The Intercept, a news website, quoted Marshall as saying: “I do not recall this. I can say it would not have been Sanders. It would probably be about a surrogate.” …

Give me a fucking break. This Brad Marshall prick was not talking about Bernie Sanders? OK, so if he was talking about a Sanders surrogate (but he was not; he is a corrupt, fucking liar who, like Wasserman Schultz and many others within the DNC, needs to resign or to be removed), then he needs to tell us, right now, exactly which Sanders surrogate he was writing about.

For the record, as I have indicated before, it is my impression of Bernie Sanders that although he is ethnically Jewish, he is agnostic to atheist (or, at least, secular). No truly intelligent person is not somewhere on the agnostic-to-atheist spectrum, and the only constitutionally and democratically sound way to govern is to do so secularly, not theocratically.

And, as I’ve written before, we in the United States of America have freedom of religion and freedom from religion, and there is not supposed to be a religious test put on the presidency.

And many if not even most of the millions of people who voted for Bernie in the Democratic Party primary elections and caucuses (including yours truly) are somewhere on the agnostic-to-atheist spectrum, so very apparently Bernie Sanders’ religious beliefs, if any, have not posed a problem for them/us.

But to bring up “[the] Jesus thing” when talking about an at-least-ethnically Jewish person — that’s so classy and so not anti-Semiticor anything, and look at how shamelessly cynically the Billarybots within the DNC were willing, ready and able to exploit religion — the “Jesus thing” — for their own political gain (and for Billary’s, of course).

And, of course, with e-mails plotting to exploit Bernie Sanders’ not being a Jeebus-lovin’ Christian, you would think that these were members of the Repugnican National Committee plotting against Bernie, not members of the Democratic National Committee. With “friends” like these, who the fuck needs enemies?

Nothing is sacred to the slimy weasels that have overtaken the Democratic National Committee. Probably mostly agnostics to atheists themselves, they’ll nonetheless gladly exploit the “Jesus thing” to try to help Billary (who probably actually is agnostic to atheist herself) and harm Bernie.

It’s long past due to clean house from top to bottom, every square fucking inch of it, and, again, merely chopping off the one slimy tentacle that is Debbie Wasserman Schultz won’t cut it.

In the wake of the rather copious physical evidence that the Democratic National Committee did everything in its power to help Billary and to harm Bernie, I already have switched my voter registration from the Democratic Party to the Green Party.

I encourage you to leave the Democratic Party, too, if you are registered with it. (I had registered with the Democratic Party only to be able to vote for Bernie in California’s presidential primary on June 7.)

The Democratic Party as it exists today does not deserve the support of those of us who are left of center, and until and unless we deprive it of our support, it will continue to accept our money and our votes while only betraying us time and time and time and time and time again.

I rather doubt that he will, but given the fact that the Democratic National Committee did not run anything remotely resembling a fair presidential contest, but, in fact, quite actively fucked over Bernie Sanders — and, by extension, his millions of supporters (including yours truly) — it is well within Bernie’s moral rights to do whatever the hell he wants to do now.

Bernie, after all, didn’t, so to speak, void any contractual agreement by acting in bad faith; the DNC did that, and it did it big-time.

Multi-millionaire Billary Clinton, photographed above at the January 2005 wedding of fellow elitists Donald and Melania Trump, apparently believes that now we commoners will ignore her Repugnican-Lite/Democrat-in-name-only record and policy positions — and her scandalousness — and instead focus exclusively on How evil Donald Trump is! We shall see how that “plan” works out for her.

Progressive writer Glenn Greenwald, whose writing on Salon.com I still miss but who still writes via his newish website The Intercept, summed up this past week’s Democratic establishment coup nicely (all links are Greenwald’s and all emphases in bold are mine):

Last night [Monday night], the Associated Press — on a day when nobody voted — surprised everyone by abruptly declaring the Democratic Party primary over and Hillary Clinton the victor. The decree, issued the night before the California primary in which polls show[ed] Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a very close race, was based on the media organization’s survey of “super-delegates”: the Democratic Party’s 720 insiders, corporate donors, and officials whose votes for the presidential nominee count the same as the actually elected [pledged] delegates.

AP claims that super-delegates who had not previously announced their intentions privately told AP reporters that they intend to vote for Clinton, bringing her over the threshold. AP is concealing the identity of the decisive super-delegates who said this.

Although the Sanders campaign rejected the validity of AP’s declaration — on the ground that the super-delegates do not vote until the convention and he intends to try to persuade them to vote for him — most major media outlets followed the projection and declared Clinton the winner.

This is the perfect symbolic ending to the Democratic Party primary: The nomination is consecrated by a media organization, on a day when nobody voted, based on secret discussions with anonymous establishment insiders and donors whose identities the media organization — incredibly — conceals.

The decisive edifice of super-delegates is itself anti-democratic and inherently corrupt: designed to prevent actual voters from making choices that the party establishment dislikes. But for a party run by insiders and funded by corporate interests, it’s only fitting that its nomination process ends with such an ignominious, awkward, and undemocratic sputter.

None of this is to deny that Hillary Clinton — as was always the case from the start — is highly likely to be the legitimately chosen winner of this process. It’s true that the party’s governing rules are deliberately undemocratic; [that] unfair and even corrupt decisions were repeatedly made by party officials to benefit Clinton; and [that] the ostensibly neutral Democratic National Committee (led by the incomparably heinous Debbie Wasserman Schultz) constantly put not just its thumb but its entire body on the scale to ensure she won.

But it’s also true that under the long-standing rules of the party, more people who voted preferred Clinton as their nominee over Sanders. Independent of super-delegates, she just got more votes. There’s no denying that.

And just as was true in 2008 with Obama’s nomination, it should be noted that standing alone — i.e., without regard to the merits of the candidate — Clinton’s nomination is an important and positive milestone.

Nonetheless, the U.S. presidency still occupies an extremely influential political and cultural position in the world. Particularly for a country with such an oppressive history on race and gender, the election of the first African-American president and nomination of the first female presidential candidate of a major party is significant in shaping how people all over the world, especially children, view their own and other people’s potential and possibilities.

But that’s all the more reason to lament this dreary conclusion. [Indeed. Billary Clinton being the very first female major-party presidential candidate is fucking depressing.]

That the Democratic Party nominating process is declared to be over in such an uninspiring, secretive, and elite-driven manner is perfectly symbolic of what the party, and its likely nominee, actually is. The one positive aspect, though significant, is symbolic, while the actual substance — rallying behind a Wall Street-funded, status quo-perpetuating, multi-millionaire militarist — is grim in the extreme. The Democratic Party got exactly the ending it deserved.

The AP had, I suppose, the First-Amendment right to pull the bullshit that it did on Monday, but in wanting to be first — the corporately owned and controlled Billary’s coronation was going to be announced by the corporately owned and controlled “news” media the next day anyway — the AP, at the minimum, acted irresponsibly.

There was no reason to wait until after California, New Jersey and the other states had voted on Tuesday for the corporately owned and controlled “news” media to prematurely declare Billary the winner (she can’t get the actual votes of the super-delegates until the end of July, so to say that she already has won the nomination is patently untrue).

The AP beat everyone else to the punch, true, but in so doing it damaged its respectability and its reputation. I hope that the assholes of the AP won’t find it to have been worth it to have flushed journalistic ethics down the toilet.

The AP not only acted journalistically and civically irresponsibly on its own, but the AP knowingly fully enabled the rest of the “news” media to do so, cravenly and slimily claiming that Hey, we’re only quoting the AP! (such as with the screenshot of The New York Times that Greenwald included in his piece).

The AP’s premature coronation of Billary is an excellent case in how members of the establishment and the establishment media work together to advance their mutual interests against us commoners.

The AP is not a corporation, but a nonprofit, but it’s a nonprofit that functions within a corporate atmosphere (first and foremost among other things, it is primarily corporate media outlets that pay for its content and thus expect the AP’s content to be within well-understood if not explicitly stated political parameters), and these days many if not most nonprofits act just like corporations, if for no other reason than that capitalism is our national religion and that corporatism permeates virtually everything within our culture.

Like Greenwald does, I recognize that from Day One, Billary likely was going to emerge as the nominee. As Greenwald wrote, yes, Billary ultimately garnered more votes than Bernie did, but what does that mean in light of the fact that it wasn’t just a plethora of thumbs on the scales, but it was body-slams on the scale, every step of the way?

There is overt, big cheating and then there is Cheating Lite: There were thousands of decisions by thousands of Clintonista sycophants throughout all 50 states who were in positions to make decisions (big, medium and small) regarding the primary elections, caucuses, delegate allocations, party rules, etc., and at thousands of junctures their decisions benefited Billary. And the super-delegates, too, of course, who, as Bernie has pointed out, had already declared their allegiance to Billary even before the first primary election or caucus had even taken place.

Even though winning California, even by a large margin, probably wouldn’t have been enough for Bernie to emerge as the victor, it still would have enabled him to go into the convention with more political capital, and so the Democratic establishment closed ranks in order to ensure that even that wouldn’t happen.

In his piece Greenwald also comments on how we Americans are patting ourselves on the back for finally having our first female presumptuous presidential candidate of the Coke Party or the Pepsi Party, and he notes that many other nations already have had female leaders.

Hell, naming just one, the odious wingnut Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of the United Kingdom during the Reagan era, is enough to demonstrate that (1) the United States finally having a female president (whenever that actually happens) is, in the big picture, no big fucking deal, and that (2) merely being a woman doesn’t make one a good (an ethical, a compassionate, a competent, etc.) leader.

When the first female U.S. president does finally come, it will be fairly anti-climactic, even for the femi-Nazis who, incorrectly feeling somehow especially empowered, will be ready to castrate every male within sight when it does.*

It’s funny, because as a male supporter of Bernie Sanders I have been branded as a “Bernie bro” by the ironically sexist Billarybots/femi-Nazis, even though I’m gay and even though I voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in November 2012, while the vast majority of the Billarybots/femi-Nazis voted for DINO President Hopey-Changey’s re-election in November 2012.

Yes, even though to the Billarybots/femi-Nazis I’m by definition “sexist” for having been born with a penis and testicles (and for not loathing myself because of that), I already have voted for a woman for president.

True, I knew that Jill Stein wouldn’t and couldn’t win the presidency in 2012, but the rise of the self-serving, center-right, sellout Billary Clinton demonstrates more than amply that the mere possession of the XX chromosomes is all that fucking matters, so guess what, Billarybot bitches? I voted for a woman for president before any of you sorry pieces of shit ever will! Ha! In your faces!

And come this November, there is a very good chance that I’ll vote for a female president again — no, absolutely not for Billary, but for Jill Stein again.

I voted for President Hopey-Changey in 2008, but once it became crystal clear even fairly early into his first term that we progressives had been punk’d again, that we’d elected a DINO who only had used us progressives to get into the White House, there was no way in hell that I could vote for President Hopey-Changey again, so in 2012 I voted my conscience and Stein won my vote. That she is a woman and women have been sorely underrepresented throughout our nation’s history was a bonus, but I didn’t vote for her because she’s a woman, but because she’s a progressive.

Elizabeth Warren’s recent belated endorsement of Billary — Warren was the last female Democratic U.S. senator to endorse Billary, which is, I’m sure, telling as to how Warren really feels about Billary, and, along with President Hopey-Changey and Veep Joe, Warren waited until all 50 states had voted before she finally endorsed Billary — means less than nothing to me.

As I’ve written before, even if Billary were to make Warren her running mate (which, per Politico, is unlikely to happen, given the believable report that Billary hates the-late-to-endorse-her Warren’s guts), that wouldn’t be enough to induce me to vote for Billary, as amusing as it is that Team Billary condescendingly and patronizingly believes that we progressives are that fucking stupid (perhaps some to even many of us are, but not all of us are).

My No. 1 problem with a Billary-Warren ticket is that Repugnican Lite Billary Fucking Clinton is anywhere on the ticket. If I want to vote for a Repugnican, I will. But I don’t fucking want to, so I won’t.

And, as I’ve noted before, as vice president, Elizabeth Warren would be completely neutralized within the Clinton 2.0 White House; Bill Clinton would be the de facto vice president (if not the de facto president).

I’m fine with two women on the ticket, and I’d be excited about a two-woman ticket, but only if both of them were actual Democrats — that is, actual progressives.

In the meantime, I agree wholeheartedly with Matt Taibbi’s take on what the Democratic Party will do now: more of the same, i.e., nothing. He writes (link is Taibbi’s and emphases in bold are mine):

… This was no ordinary primary race, not a contest between warring factions within the party establishment, á la Obama-Clinton in ’08 or even Gore-Bradley in ’00. This was a barely quelled revolt that ought to have sent shock waves up and down the party, especially since the Vote of No Confidence overwhelmingly came from the next generation of voters. Yet editorialists mostly drew the opposite conclusion.

Hohmann’s thesis was that the “scope and scale” of Clinton’s wins Tuesday night meant mainstream Democrats could now safely return to their traditional We won, screw you posture of “minor concessions” toward the “liberal base.”

Hohmann focused on the fact that with Bernie out of the way, Hillary now had a path to victory that would involve focusing on Trump’s negatives. Such a strategy won’t require much if any acquiescence toward the huge masses of Democratic voters who just tried to derail her candidacy. And not only is the primary scare over, but Clinton and the centrist Democrats in general are in better shape than ever. …

Indeed, that’s how the establishment Dems no doubt are viewing this: “the primary scare” is over, so let’s get back to the status quo. That already happened on Monday, in fact, when the establishmentarian AP obediently declared that the status quo once again was safe.

… If they had any brains, Beltway Dems and their clucky sycophants … would not be celebrating this week. They ought to be horrified to their marrow that the all-powerful Democratic Party ended up having to dig in for a furious rally to stave off a quirky Vermont socialist almost completely lacking big-dollar donors or institutional support. …

But to read the papers in the last two days is to imagine that we didn’t just spend a year witnessing the growth of a massive grassroots movement fueled by loathing of the party establishment, with some correspondingly severe numerical contractions in the turnout department (though she won, for instance, Clinton received 30 percent fewer votes in California this year versus 2008, and 13 percent fewer in New Jersey). …

Democratic voters tried to express [their] frustrations through the Sanders campaign, but the party leaders have been and probably will continue to be too dense to listen. Instead, they’ll convince themselves that, as Hohmann’s Post article put it, Hillary’s latest victories mean any “pressure” they might have felt to change has now been “ameliorated.”

The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.

This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. It’s exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.

But they won’t do that, because they don’t see what just happened this year as a message rising up from millions of voters. …

Yup.

And let’s face it: Most of Billary Clinton’s supporters are baby boomers. Billary and her boomer cohort’s primary concern is to keep the sick and twisted status quo going for as long as possible, because the status quo has been very, very good for them. What happens to the generations that follow them never has been their concern; for them it’s always been about what they can get for themselves while they still can.

Boomer Billary has eked out a victory for now, but it wasn’t a clean victory — nothing about the Clintons is clean — and we’ll see how she fares in November, without the support of me and millions of other voters whom the Democratic Party has alienated over these past many months, believing that our support is either inevitable or at least expendable.

—

*My definition of “femi-Nazi,” by the way, is Wikipedia’s first definition: “a term used pejoratively to describe either feminists who are perceived as extreme or radical, women who are perceived as seeking superiority over men, rather than equality, or in some cases, to describe all feminists.”

While it was Rush Limbaugh, unfortunately, who coined the term (or who at least brought it into prominence), I don’t subscribe to a definition of the term that includes all feminists. (Indeed, to me, a femi-Nazi by definition isn’t an actual feminist at all.) I understand Limbaugh’s definition of the term he coined to include all feminists.

My definition of the term “femi-Nazi” is something like this: “a woman who calls herself a feminist but who actually is just a rank misandrist who isn’t interested in equality of the sexes, but who wants women to dominate men, as ‘justified’ revenge for the wrongs done to women by men in the past.”

The term “misandrist” pretty much captures all of that, but “femi-Nazi” is a lot more fun, and while I see the term written as “feminazi” on the Internet, I’ll stick with my own “femi-Nazi” rendition of term.

My definition of a “feminist,” by the way, is something like this: “a woman (or a man!) who believes in the sociopolitical equality of the sexes, and who opposes the mistreatment of or the discrimination against or the preferential treatment of anyone based primarily or solely upon his or her sex.”

(Yes, preferential treatment of someone based on his or her sex, race, age, sexual orientation, religion, etc., is just the other side of the discrimination coin. That you’re benefiting someone, that is, discriminating for someone instead of discriminating against someone, doesn’t make it any better, because you’re just engaging in “good” discrimination, which is still engaging in discrimination, which you can’t say is OK only when it benefits you or those whom you wish it to benefit.)

A lot of the Billarybots don’t fit my definition of “feminist” above. This “Bernie bro,” however, considers himself to be a feminist. Just not a femi-Nazi.

Progressive presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and his wife Jane appear at a rally in Los Angeles in March. Sanders is within striking distance of Billary Clinton in the latest poll of California, and plans to debate Donald Trump before California votes in its presidential primary election on June 7. (Billary cravenly reneged on her previous agreement to debate Bernie one last time this month, so this is her karmic return.)

The latest polling of California by the Public Policy Institute of California – the California polling outfit that I trust the most – has Billary Clinton at only 2 percent ahead of Bernie Sanders, 46 percent to 44 percent.

In March, Billary had been beating Bernie in California 48 percent to 41 percent in PPIC’s polling; the momentum in the nation’s most populous state is Bernie’s.

Bernie’s massive rallies and TV ads in the state appear to have been helping him. (Billary, by contrast, has been having expensive, exclusive fundraisers at rich people’s homes instead of rallies, and has been using her husband as her surrogate, and, to my knowledge, has yet to air any TV ads here in California.)

Don’t get me wrong – I still expect Billary to drag her tired, center-right/Democrat-in-name-only, 1990s-era carcass into the July Democratic Party convention with more pledged delegates than Bernie, but her losing the most populous blue state so close to the convention sure would help Bernie’s argument that he’s the stronger candidate to face off with Donald Trump.

True, it’s unusual for a candidate who has yet to sew up his or her party’s presidential nomination to debate the opposing party’s presumptive presidential nominee, but what has been normal about this presidential election cycle?

Regardless of its level of orthodoxy (which is quite low), I love the symbolism, the visuals, of an imminent Sanders-Trump debate: Billary is “too busy” to debate Bernie a final time before the June 7 California primary, but/so Bernie is going to debate Trump.

The political optics will be of Bernie already taking on Trump even before the Democratic Party primary convention.Sweet.

Only if Bernie does horribly in the debate with Trump could it harm him politically, but I don’t expect him to do horribly.

Of course, it strikes me that there still is time for the Democratic National Committee to try to quash the Sanders-Trump debate – because it’s brilliantly unorthodox and because it circumvents the DNC’s (that is, Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s) iron fist – and if they (well, if she) can try, she probably will try.

After all, the “Democratic” National Committee isn’t about democracy; it’s about installing Billary Clinton in the White House.

And under a President Sanders, that would change in short order, starting with his promise to fire the corrupt Billarybot Debbie Wasserman Schultz as head of the DNC and to return the Democratic Party to its progressive roots.

Update (Friday, May 27, 2016): Reuters, in a two-paragraph news item, reports today that Trump has pulled out of a debate with Bernie. Reuters reports (in full):

Washington — U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said [today] he would not debate Democrat Bernie Sanders ahead of California’s June 7 primary.

“Based on the fact that the Democratic nominating process is totally rigged … it seems inappropriate that I would debate the second-place finisher,” Trump said in a statement.

That’s a bullshit reason, and because of the poor wording I’m not even certain what the hell it means — my impression is that Trump just chickened out and that, just like Billary did, he reneged on a promise to debate Bernie — but I guess it’s nice to see Trump point out, as he has before, that “the Democratic nominating process is totally rigged.” Because it is. It has been tilted in Billary’s favor from Day One.

Based on the fact that the Democratic nominating process is totally rigged and Crooked Hillary Clinton and Deborah Wasserman Schultz will not allow Bernie Sanders to win, and now that I am the presumptive Republican nominee, it seems inappropriate that I would debate the second-place finisher.

Likewise, the networks want to make a killing on these events and are not proving to be too generous to charitable causes, in this case, women’s health issues. Therefore, as much as I want to debate Bernie Sanders — and it would be an easy payday — I will wait to debate the first-place finisher in the Democratic Party, probably Crooked Hillary Clinton, or whoever it may be.

That’s a fuller statement, but I still call chicken shit on Trump. He did not give a good reason to back out, and apparently his word is as good as is “Crooked Hillary’s.”